Brand Strategy 101
Lesson 4: The Value of You
Go from feeling undervalued to finding confidence to charge more.
Reflect
What was most useful for you in this lesson?
I was stuck on a loop being told what to do, doing work that felt like it didn't matter, until I had this one big realization.
Once upon a time I remember asking for $200 for a logo design. I served up the price like an apology. If the client had said "make it a hundred" I would have said "sure thing" and felt relieved. I remember hearing a client angrily accusing me of disloyalty for daring to suggest a higher price than they were used to. I would begin projects without ever exchanging money, let alone discussing it. I thought of sales as being somehow dirty or immoral. I did anything I could to avoid difficult conversations, mostly by saying yes to anything and everything that came my way. I hid behind 10 page proposals that took a whole day to put together. I used to feel like I had an impossible amount of learning to do, before I could feel confident. I remember feeling like I had to have The Answer as soon as a client - or even a prospect - asked a question. More often than not I thought the answer was a logo. I once went through 50 different logo iterations until the client decided to stick with the old one. I remember thinking I knew better than my clients. I remember thinking they were nightmares.
But it wasn't my clients who were causing me to work late nights on the weekends or to struggle every month to pay my bills: I was a nightmare designer.
I constantly undercharged for my work and then resented my clients for not valuing me. I didn't appreciate at the time that I was undervaluing myself first. I avoided talking numbers because I was scared of upsetting people and because deep down I believed I wasn't good enough to charge what I wanted to charge. I felt like my clients were always demanding all my time and attention without respecting my boundaries, but I never set any. I thought experience, knowledge and expertise were what I was supposed to be selling. I failed to understand that I was making myself more important than my clients, and because of it, we were both losing out.
I was so focused on having to be right - for fear of being wrong- that I was blinded to the problems I was helping to create. After all, what good did weeks of frustrated effort and 50 logo designs achieve!? It didn't help the company. And it certainly didn't help me.
I know this might sound heavy. I know this might even feel heavy, particularly if you notice some of these patterns in yourself. But I want you to just sit with that feeling for a moment, if you'll humor me, because it's telling us something important is happening. And what's more, just like me, you deserve to feel able to look keenly at your problems with the unspoken belief that you can and will improve and learn and grow, with confidence and happiness. Our problems and failures don't define us - any more than our successes. Instead it's what we believe about ourselves that makes us who we are. And that is something we have the power to change, at any time.
Which leads us rather neatly to step one of how to charge big bucks for your noodles: Acknowledge the problem. You are worth more than you think.
I struggled to charge money for my thinking - so that I could help solve big, meaningful problems - because deep down I underestimated my own value. I felt like an imposter pretending to run a business. I had diagnosed my own problem as needing more knowledge, experience and expertise, before I could go on to have the confidence to say numbers like '$10,000' - or even 2,000 - without flinching. I thought I was supposed to sell my expertise and I thought experts were supposed to have all the answers. Little did I know that our value lies not in what we say, but how we listen, not in what we already know, but what we come to understand. But that's another story. See you in part 2.
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